Method actor Andrew Garfield revealed that he abstained from sex and food to prepare for his role as a 17th-century Jesuit priest in the 2016 film ‘Silence’.
“I was doing a lot of spiritual practices every day, I was creating new rituals, I was celibate for six months, and I was fasting a lot,” Garfield said on Monday’s episode of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron.
“It was really cool, man,” he continued. “I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences of starving myself from sex and food during that time.”
Finally, Garfield studied for a year with the Jesuit writer Father James Martin, whom he referred to as his “friend and spiritual director.”
Martin, 61, helped Garfield, 39, research Catholicism and guided the Oscar nominee through a series of spiritual practices to prepare for his role in the Martin Scorsese-directed historical drama.
Garfield said he and Martin turned to the same rituals Konstantin Stanislavski followed to come up with method acting over 100 years earlier.
While the “Amazing Spider-Man” star championed the acting style, he acknowledged that sometimes things can get out of hand.
“Over there [have] a lot of misconceptions about what method acting is, I think,” he said in the podcast. “People still behave that way, and it’s not about everyone on set being an a-hole. It’s really just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances while being really nice to the crew and being a normal human being and being able to drop it when you need to and stay in it when you want to stay in it.
But the rigorous technique may have taken its toll on Garfield, who recently revealed he’s stepping back from Hollywood to “just be for a while.”
“I’m going to take a rest,” he told Variety in April.
The much-needed rest seems like the “Tick, Tick…Boom!” star well as he was spotted last week while on holiday in Bali.
Photos of a shirtless, muscular Garfield instantly went viral on social media and drove his fans crazy.